Live TV going black on Firestick 4K

[persim]

fritsch believes its due to a bug in the firmware that causes crashing with interlaced content. Since this has been known for over a year without any fix, I'm not counting on it ever getting fixed.

Is transcoding possible with the kodi addon? Found older thread over on kodi forum where you and sub say no but what is the timeshifting feature doing? Couldn't get KNEWC to run smoothly on the firestick. Was hoping for an update to the nextpvr android app but no go. Will have to try jellyfin if not possible on kodi addon.

[mvallevand]

Yes in Matrix sub and I implemented a transcoding option and I recently updated that to allow timeshifting. Timeshift allows pause and rewind on live tv. Transcoding takes a while to start up, similar to the browser though.

Transcoding will also work best if your PC can do h/w transcoding however sub will need to confirm that the trancoding options do the interlacing. There could be some advantage over wifi moving h264 instead of mpeg2video, but you will loss 5:1 sound.

Martin

[persim]

Ok, thanks for info. Will try transcoding with a matrix build and see how it goes. Timeshifting and 5.1 are not important so hopefully this will be the answer.

[persim]

An update for anyone who has same problem.

Amazon's firmware fix for the interlaced video problem with the Firestick 4K did not solve my issues. Still randomly crashed to black screen while watching live tv.

Took a chance and got a new chromecast with google tv. Happy to report that everything is running great with kodi. No more random crashes while watching live tv.

The nextpvr android app kinda works on direct play but I get a lot of audio sync issues and the documented app elements problems are still there.

Just wish kodi would change their odd nomenclature and the inability to set a global sort type for all recordings. But other than that am very pleased with the new setup.

[mvallevand]

What global sort are you thinking of? I can't think of any sort at the root level that I would want at level 1 other than possibly name which I believe is default anyway.

The only odd nomenclature is something I came up with Kodi style recordings which I hope to document better in Matrix. This mode is caused by the refusal of the Kodi team to support PR's that allow season episode sorts. I think this is because of their DVB background. Interestingly enough NextPVR doesn't have this sort either probably for the same reason. This mode is really a hack to show the SE in the title but if you note the title is missing from shows on other metadata including the player. I am happy to changes this if a better name is suggested.

Martin

[persim]

Don't think it has anything to do with what you made with the plugin but kodi itself.

The switch and timer/timer rules nomenclature has always driven me crazy. Watch and scheduled/recurring makes a lot more sense to me.

Unless I'm doing something wrong, always a good possibility, you have to manually change the sort on each show's recording folder. As you said they do not support episode numbers. The way around that which works mostly is to sort by date. Never been able to find a way to sort all recordings within their folders this way. Have to manually change it each time a new show folder is created.

[mvallevand]

The name of timers I am still not used to either but for Kodi users coming to NextPVR it might seem equally odd.

I want level 0 date descending but I want shows date ascending, since I typically don't watch right away so it is still not the same sort. If you do want a global change maybe posting on Kodi forum is a better choice. @pkscout might have a suggestion if this can be done through a skin mod.

Martin

[mvallevand]

I had a look at the Kodi code and the default sort order is hard coded to date descending which I think is a good default. That is recording date not air date. Everything gets saved to a view table in Viewmode6.db where non defaults are saved at the folder level.

Is the issue you and the order to be date ascending or would you like it to default to sort by name so you can see NextPVR faked S#E# order?


Martin.

[persim]

I like ascending by date, gets the closest for me to go by episode #. Never understood why they made it descending by default but to each their own.

What kills me is not being able to change that easily one time. I've seen it mentioned a couple times over the years on their forums but nothing seems to ever come of it.

[mvallevand]

Could you point me to the posts where it was rejected, maybe I can submit a PR if there wasn't a good reason given. Date descending makes far more sense for me, I like to see recently recorded before archives.

Martin